Monthly Archives: January 2011

An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rands law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rands behalf she secured Rands Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O’Connor (husband Frank O’Connor.)

As Pryor said, “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out” without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently… She didnt feel that an individual should take help.”

TUCSON — A week after a gunman killed six people and injured 13 others here, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a gun show at the county fairgrounds went forward as planned on Saturday and the Safeway supermarket where the shooting occurred reopened for business.

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Rick Krueger, the first person in line early Saturday at the Crossroads of the West gun show, held at the Pima County Fairgrounds here, blamed weaknesses in the mental health system, not guns, for the shooting spree.

“It’s not guns that kill people,” said Mr. Krueger. “People kill people.” Mr. Krueger, 58, who said he had worked in the mental health field, said he came to the gun show to buy ammunition for a rifle he uses for target practice and hunting.

Right. Crazy, unstable and/or ill-meaning people are unstoppable killing machines, and as soon as one decides to do something bad everyone they intend to target immediately drops dead from the sheer force of bad intentions. Jared Loughner probably could’ve dropped a dozen people in as many seconds with a knife or baseball bat; obviously the gun is incidental.

Here’s another example of an unstoppable homicidal lunatic. I don’t see how anything would’ve gone down any differently if that was a bat, a rake, or a stuffed animal in his hands:

A former police chief who organized a gun fair was found not guilty of all charges in the 2008 death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi submachine gun.

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Fleury’s firearms training company co-sponsored the annual Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club, about 10 miles (16 kilometres) west of Springfield. Christopher, of Ashford, Connecticut, was shooting a 9 mm micro Uzi at pumpkins when the gun kicked back and shot him in the head.

The brainwashing people through grammar aspect of the Tucson shooting is something I’ve been trying to figure out. It’s entirely new to me and completely baffling, but it seems that it’s fairly prevalent among the tinfoil hat crowd. Sovereign Citizen whackjobs have created their own set of legal theories to go along with the “mathematical interface for language” nonsense concocted by the previously mentioned David-Wynn: Miller. This stuff is all over Youtube; as an example, check out the results of a search for “Accepted For Value,” a phrase which these tax protestor weirdos apparently believe they can use to magically discharge debts, back taxes, etc. simply by writing it on any bills that show up. (Something about it then being paid outt’ve your secret Treasury account that’s held underground in Manhattan, if I’m following it well enough to even describe the lunacy in words.) As you can see they’re big on making their own documents, passports, licenses, etc. There are a lot of hucksters associated with this stuff too, offering to sell you secret information that’ll let you opt outt’ve personhood, discharge your debt, ignore taxes, and all kinds of other wonderful stuff. Hell, you can probably learn how to shit solid gold bricks if you eat food that’s punctuated correctly.

Note the characteristic punctuated name

Seems that the S.C. movement is also big on so-called paper terrorism, ie. clogging up the courts with frivolous filings. In some cases this leads to cases being dropped — when the relevant authority decides that the flood of time-wasting paperwork isn’t worth dealing with over a dog licensing case for instance.* From what I’ve read so far, people misunderstanding the cause-and-effect relationship in these instances seems to be where the imaginary S.C. legalese mumbo-jumbo gains an air of credibility. Along those lines, these ideas are understandably gaining traction in prisons as desperate inmates and accused look for ways to get themselves freed. Washington Monthly has a piece from 2008 where they get into the case of some black Baltimore drug dealers who end up trying to use this line of “defense” — which originated with the Posse Comitatus and other hate groups — to get off after being charged for selling drugs & murdering other dealers.

By no means am I making light of what happened in Tucson, and at this point it’s not even known where Loughner came up with his theories about the grammar stuff. Separate from its potential involvement in Loughner’s motivations though, I find this whole set of imaginary legal theories and arbitrary grammatical/linguistic rules absolutely fascinating. They have theories about the “Universal Postal Union” controlling the world, the Accepted for Value thing, and a long list of other equally nutty stuff. According to the SPLC article about the Kain incident there are some 300,000 or so people in the US who’re associated with this movement, and I figure they can’t all be crazy. Do you suppose this is like religion to these people? That’s the only way I can come up with to understand how people are retreating so fully into a fantasy world.

In late November, Kurtz wrote a story in The Daily Beast about “tough-talking” Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. The story was based on what Kurtz thought was a phone interview with Issa. But it turns out that, no, Kurtz had actually been speaking to Issa’s spokesman, Kurt Bardella, the entire time. Hate when that happens! Today, Kurtz writes:

On Nov. 29, after my story ran on The Daily Beast, I got a note from Bardella saying there had been “a little confusion” and “it wasn’t the congressman you spoke with, it was me speaking in his capacity as his spokesman.”

Bardella had never told me that during the conversation, though there was one reference to “Darrell Issa” that I attributed to lawmakers sometimes speaking of themselves in the third person. To my best understanding, none of the opinions ascribed to Rep. Issa are inaccurate. But it’s now clear the attribution should have been to his spokesman, and I erred in not dealing with this matter immediately.

Apparently this “Hillbuzz” thing is the new Gateway Pundit, as it’s been leading the league in “breaking” breathless “reporting” about how Tucson is 100% attributable to liberals. The linked piece above is a very impressive piece of hackwork where he attempts to paint Fred Fucking Phelps as a liberal because he’s a registered Democrat who has lost a bunch of Democratic primaries and once had his picture taken with Al Gore. You’ll notice that the comment count on the page is up around 130, yet there are only 87 visible comments. It must be a bummer churning out work so hackish that you sit in fear of dissent to the point of censoring about 1/3 of the things people are trying to say about it.

An opinion poll on a factual issue for which there was (on Jan 9-10, and still is as of this moment) zero factual evidence? What the fuck?

Nearly six in 10 Americans say the country’s heated political rhetoric is not to blame for the Tucson shooting rampage that left six dead and critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, according to a CBS News poll.

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Overall, 57 percent of respondents said the harsh political tone had nothing to do with the shooting, compared to 32 percent who felt it did. Republicans were more likely to feel the two were unrelated – 69 percent said rhetoric was not to blame; 19 percent said it played a part. Democrats were more split on the issue – 49 percent saw no connection; 42 percent said there was.

Unlike the issues of whether abortion is murder, taxation is theft, etc. the question of whether Loughner was motivated by overheated rhetoric could be determined to be factually true or false by interviewing him. He might not cooperate or his answers might prove ambiguous, but it’s at least possible that he would make some statements that would remove room for doubt as to where he’s coming from. Whether or not Loughner was influenced by violent rhetoric is not a matter of opinion, so what the fuck is the point asking people what they think at any stage, let alone within 24 hours of the shooting taking place?

It’s pretty fucking revealing that within a day of Giffords getting shot, a representative polling sample showed that at minimum, 85%* of people thought they had it all figured out. Could we be any more self-absorbed? I’m sure Colbert’s character would love seeing CBS News use phrasing that indicates that hat’s truly important here is what we feel happened.